Robot Sets New World Record For Solving Rubik's Cube

Posted Dec 10, 2013 4:37:20 PM |
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Constructed entirely from Lego, including four Mindstorms NXT kits programmed in LabVIEW, with the addition of a Samsung Galaxy S II Android smartphone running a custom app as its brain, this robot has set the new World Record for solving a Rubik’s Cube, beating human Feliks Zemdegs’ former record by 0.4 seconds. CubeStormer II, as the robot is called, has thus set a Guiness World Record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solver at 5.27 seconds.

The app uses the phone's camera to capture images of each face of the Rubik's Cube which it processes to determine the scrambled colors. The solution is found using an advanced multi-threaded two-phase algorithm running on the smartphone's dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.2 GHz processor. The software finds an efficient solution to the puzzle which is optimized specifically for the capabilities of the four-grip mechanism. The app communicates via Bluetooth with the intelligent Lego bricks that control the motors driving the robot. The app displays in real time a graphical version of the cube being solved.

Elektor accidentally ran into CubeStormer II as it was on display this week at Embedded World show in Nuremberg. Here the robot set an even better time of 4.275 seconds but, as pointed out by Mike Dobson and Dave Gilday, the builders of the robot, this may have been due to the start configuration of the cube that was possibly too easy to solve. Video footage recorded by the phone may lead to homologation of this extremely fast time.